Idea Generator

Academia is one of those realms in which one finds confident people and insecure people. It bothers me that, while disciplinary boundaries have been becoming more porous for years now, some people still stake out their territory with a persistent defensiveness. While I acknowledge that each discipline has a specialized vocabulary and set of interests and working methods, there is a way to translate these across disciplines. Collaboration cannot happen otherwise. The best thinkers, in my opinion, are tangential ones...those who make unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated things.

This musing of mine goes back to the notion of sharing rather than hording knowledge that I brought up in my very first blog entry. The only reason to be insecure about your own ideas is to think you have a finite number of them which is, of course, absurd. Barring cognitive impairment through injury or genetic factors, there is no limit to the amount one can process information and think.

I find that constant reading, writing, and creative work keeps ideas tumbling --- there are too many to act upon. Regular engagement and discussion of what interests you is the key to not only inspiring others, but making this very point.

In other words, my advice to fledgling academics as well as entrenched professionals is: invigorate those around you; thrive on your own interests (while making them interesting to others, especially those most remote from those interests --- convince them of their appeal). Be an idea generator!

Evolution and Organization (or Merging Again)

We all evolved from the microbial world; our ancestors are bacterial. I'm thinking again of the ideas of symbiosis, planetary integrity, merging with more complex networks, and our incredibly destructive human hubris. In Lynn Margulis' book Symbiotic Planet [A New Look at Evolution], she writes: "There are no 'higher' beings, no 'lower animals,' no angels, and no gods . . . Even the 'higher' primates, the monkeys and apes...are not higher. We Homo sapiens sapiens and our primate relations are not special, just recent: we are newcomers on the evolutionary stage." In other words, we need to reconnect with and respect our origins and understand (at a much deeper cognitive and visceral level) how our short-term actions and self-centred needs impact the environment, all ecostystems, the globe, and life generally. We newcomers are very dangerous children.

Margulis also notes: "The tendency of 'independent' life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm." I'm still waiting for us to show signs of our potential to reach this higher wholeness, since we so frequently seem to be stalled in self-destruct mode. We are painfully slow to wake up to our failures. let alone compensate for them.

Automatons are Ancient

When people think "robots," and "history," it is probably quite common to think of the 1950s - pulp science fiction, B-movies, and Walt Disney. As an art historian interested in technologies and art, I have a visual catalogue of mechanical life forms that is immense. Before robots, androids, and cyborgs, there were animated creatures of all kinds. Not every example comes with an extant image, but there are written descriptions of machinic "life" that go back to antiquity. Chinese puppets given motion through quicksilver, engineered mechanisms by Ctesibius (early 3rd C BCE), the pneumatica described by Philo of Byzantium (late 3rd C BCE), which operated using air and fluid mechanics, Mannerist grottoes concealing curious theatrical mechanisms that would spring into action to delight visitors, the complex clockworks made by Swiss and German inventors --- these all predate the more familiar automatons of the 18th century, by the likes of Jaquet-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson.

There is a nice overview in Barbara Maria Stafford's essay: "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," in Devices of Wonder. From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: the Getty Research Institute, 2001).

So, next time you ponder the future, simultaneously ponder the past. A fuller understanding of robots, androids, and cyborgs, comes from examining their histories.

Letting Go...

"Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to 'communicate' through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn to find our way within a mutating, wandering cosmos, to become to the extent possible, its authors, to collectively invent ourselves as a species. Collective intelligence is less concerned with self-control of human communities than with a fundamental letting-go that is capable of altering our very notion of identity and the mechanisms of domination and conflict, lifting restrictions on heretofore banned communications, and effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts."
-Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence. Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, from Prologue, p. xxvi-xxvii

What is it with French male theorists' inability to use the word humankind! Other than that, I'm intrigued by what Levy says. There are so many publications out there about the posthuman condition or our mutation into a new species, one irrevocably yoked to, inflected by, technological systems. However, I am always suspicious of utopian notions that are not accompanied by examples of what this might actually mean or what it might look like. Of course, it could just be me that even views this type of theorizing as utopian; for some people it is a nightmarish dystopia. I'd like to cautiously occupy a shifting middle ground, neither technophobic nor technophilic, neither repulsed nor seduced...

Merging

"Biology and technology evidence parallel tendencies toward collective, hierarchical processes based on information exchange. As information is distributed, it tends to be represented (encoded) by increasingly economical (meaningful) forms. This evolutionary process, whereby the most economical or meaningful representation wins, leads to a hierarchy of languages, encoding meaning on levels that transcend comprehension by the system's individual components - whether genes, insects, microprocessors, or human minds."
-George B. Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines. The Evolution of Global Intelligence, p. 8.

Collective intelligence, global brain, hive mind, networked consciousness...what does it mean when we make analogies between biological and technological systems? What is erased or required in order to make such comparisons? The idea of a networked intelligence spanning the globe and greater than the sum of its parts, "alive" if you will, is a seductive one. Is this the 21st century's version of God?

Global intelligence requires us to interrogate our long-held belief in unique selfhood. This selfhood has given the human species not only an evolutionary advantage, but also a destructive superiority complex. Can we relinquish it and embrace our interconnectedness not only with all life, but with all information systems? Will you accept "intelligence" if it is defined as a massive parallel processor? Are you ready to merge?

Women Artists and Science

I recommend visiting the Richmond Art Gallery by May 17th to view an exhibition curated by Deborah Koenker (http://richmondartgallery.org/). Two artists, Brenna Maag and Ingrid Koening, have examined the relationships between art and science, but in very different ways.
Observation of Wonder is an installation consisting of two parts. Maag has created a domed structure, Conservatory, which is magical to experience. Standing inside the 9' high dome, viewers can examine over 700 hand-crocheted doilies from the artist's collection. Within the striking patterns of the doilies attached to the interior walls, the viewer can see that this anonymous women's labour consists of beautiful patterns and mathematical complexity. It is commonplace for people to view doilies as anachronistic decor, but looking at so many examples removed from their usual context, reveals their stunning intricacy and the skill involved in making them.
The other part of Observation of Wonder is Taxonomy, in which Maag made a series of cyanotype prints to document the doily patterns. Each doily shows up as white on dark blue and resembles a specimen from nature. The cyanotype process --- which involves placing specimens on chemically treated paper that is light sensitive --- is a form of imaging without a camera that was used in the 1840s by Anna Atkins, a British botanist, for documenting botanical specimens. Maag's invented classification system for the doilies plays on the Latin names in the scientific principles of taxonomy that order plants and animals. The doilies are thus placed in families with double Latin names to denote genus and species. For example, doilies that reference star-like patterns are placed in the family Stellatusaceae (stella means star in Latin).
Maag poetically brings together domestic labour, patterns of nature, mathematics, and scientific ordering.
Ingrid Koenig's Navigating the Uncertainty Principle attempts to chart the complexity of the everyday through drawings and paintings that demonstrate the beauty of abstract concepts, such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Koenig asks how these underlying laws are at work in our daily lives. Her detailed drawings and paintings are alive with dense mark-making denoting the forces of electromagnetism, molecular processes, and the circulation of air currents. No objects are immune; movement is everywhere and invisible phenomena are given a presence that, rather than remaining on the level of abstract science, is interwoven with subjectivity. Gravitational forces and explosive pressures become metaphors not only for uncertainties over our own sense of place and self, but also over the current crises of the world.
Both women artists use science to inform their work, and though their motivations diverge dramatically, their works nevertheless resonate beautifully together. I'll never look at doilies or supposedly "static" objects the same way again.

Learning and Extension

"Chaos theory and self-organization and social network theories suggest that we acquire learning competences from forming connections between disparate ideas and fields in which links between them represent survival in an interconnected world. Amplification of learning, knowledge, and understanding through the extension of a personal network into a global network is the epitome of a new learning culture" - Mel Alexenberg, ed. Educating Artists for the Future. Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture, p.15.

This is one reason I am so committed to a unique degree that will facilitate these types of connections in a way that fuses the history of technology and its impact on all the disciplines, a reinvigorated humanities that fosters connections with pure and applied science, social science, the visual arts, and that embraces applied options for those students who want to be cultural content providers, new media artists, and new media authors.

Summer Reading List Number 1

I am in the midst of all of these books, but hope to finish them during the summer. I will comment on them periodically. They relate to courses I teach already, such as "Art and Technology" (AHIS 215), and to courses in the works, such as the 300-level courses "Museums and Collecting: The Rhetorics and Rituals of Display" and "Aesthetics and Theories of Vision" (these titles aren't set in stone yet). The following books are in no particular order.

Da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip, eds. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and
Technoscience. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2008.

Barker, Emma, ed. Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1999.

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool. Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Jones, Caroline A., ed. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Visual Arts Center; Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: The MIT Press, 2006.

Ruinous Collaboration

I mean ruinous in the good way, the way that demolishes oppressive forces and wrecks unethical enactments of power. I was thinking of a book I've been reading for a course I'm developing: "Art, Activism, and Citizenship." The book is Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, edited by Scott McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis.

Here is a quote from page 19: "Historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis; in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society." While it is arguable that trauma can actually be quite constant, and that there are, sadly, hotspots of conflict and pain all around the globe most of the time, there is some merit in this notion of uprising as a response. But how about uprising as a strategic intervention prior to things reaching the crisis point? An emerging critical mass might not always succeed in terms of their motivations, but there is an ethical imperative in the very attempt to voice dissent. Another quote: "Terror begins when the voice of the other is denied, displaced or disfigured" (p. 7). Misrepresentation is a real danger.

Given the potential of collaboration to be ruinous, how, then, to bring this to the classroom level, often so remote from the blood and guts of capitalism, colonialism, terrorism? How to get students to work productively and collaboratively (when they so often sigh and roll their eyes when forced into group work)? Projects have to be hands-on, relevant to the current climate, and applicable to their concerns. Any collaborative project should have clear goals and measurable outcomes. If it makes a difference, if it changes the class dynamic, if it invigorates and energizes debate and renews commitment to a just cause, then it should be shared widely with other students and instructors as a model for projects in diverse disciplines.

Network, networking, net worth.

Sandroid

Studio Art Grad Speech April 2009

Each year I choose a theme. This year it's a double theme: communication and transformation --- two of art's most important roles. How do communication and transformation relate to art education? Training artists is a privilege. But there can be no teaching and learning without communication, and the process of education at its best is transformative. The point is to get artists to the point where they find their own voice and visual language. The English professor Lauren Berlant noted in a public lecture that the true pedagogical moment is one of profound discomfort. I've always liked that statement, because it does not describe passive learning. I take it to mean active engagement and critical thinking. When they merge, perceptions change and one's worldview shifts. I have witnessed such moments and they are very powerful; actually they are the reason I am an instructor.

The art historian James Elkins has written: "Art is among the experiences I rely on to alter what I am (The Object Stares Back, p. 41). This altering can be uplifting, disturbing, unsettling, or emotionally charged.

What does the theme have to do with art practice? Embracing the potential of art to communicate and transform puts you, as artists, in a unique position of cultural responsibility. You cannot impose meaning in your work, though you might have meanings in mind when you create it. However, once it leaves your hands and goes out into the public realm, you have relinquished that control, that ownership.

Meaning occurs in that space of exchange between object and observer. Viewers are not passive either. Artists must understand perception and formal means of expression, and have absorbed the history of visual culture in order to communicate deeply with viewers. Art always involves self-scrutiny and self-criticism because of that immense responsibility. But what could be more enriching than facilitating a transformation in another human being, to change that person irrevocably?

The highest aspirations of art are not to be beautiful or to endure, but to communicate effectively, sometimes forcefully, sometimes in a way that leaves us frozen on the spot or awe-struck. Or sometimes, art quietly and silently nudges us.

Of course, this is only if we really see it. Because often we're blind to it, already too overstimulated, rushed, distracted with everyday challenges and struggles. It takes time, effort, and concentration to look. Looking is far from straightforward. It is very rewarding, though, when images and objects burn into our consciousness, when we are psychologically marked by the artist's mark-making.

Whether art delivers buoyant optimism or gut-wrenching despair, it expands our knowledge and awareness so that we better understand our place, are better able to respond, and better equipped for our confrontation with reality. But we have to be open to it, risk vulnerability, be willing to have our assumptions challenged, even demolished.

Here's hoping you can achieve that in your work. I can't think of anything more important than the fine arts for instilling a sense of deep conviction about who we are and who we can be. Like poetry, art is what nourishes us at a level far beyond basic necessities or material comforts. It sustains us in ways that words fail to describe.

If art did not have this power, it would be superfluous, just another form of entertainment or easy amusement. But art is not easy. So if you have skill and determination, if you have something to say, if you have a stake in what you're doing, if you feel compelled to create, then I hope we've contributed to that in some small measure. Don't let anyone stop you. As the artist Jean Tinguely said: "Let us be transformed"!

Sandra Seekins
Studio Art Coordinator

Inspiration

This morning at a Professional Development event at Capilano University, I attended a talk by UBC's Brian Lamb. It was very inspiring and made me reassess blogging and its values. I'd never really been convinced of the merits of blogging, but Brian's examples changed my mind. He spoke of his Abject Learning blog, the cost effectiveness of open systems, and genuine engagement in a "reciprical economy."


He eloquently concluded that institutions need to embrace information abundance not information scarcity if they are to contribute to national wealth. I agree. Too often in academia, as well as in other realms of endeavour, people jealously guard their turf, try to protect their territory, and horde - rather than share - teaching strategies and resources. I've never understood this strain of ownership. Not only have the boundaries between disciplines been dissolving for decades now, but the advancement of knowledge comes from discussion, interaction, engagement!


If we are to move toward an information commons, a creative commons, a learning commons, etc., then we need to remind ourselves that open sourceware is the best way forward. Many people are creating culture by doing amazing things for the highest ethical values and for no material gain.


Remix, reuse, rethink!


Sandroid